Named the state's best trial lawyer by his peers earlier this year, Larry Franklin has settled more than 20 cases for $1 million or more and won the biggest medical negligence verdict in Kentucky history -- $27.6 million.

He's been elected to the Inner Circle of Advocates, an elite bastion of the nation's top 100 plaintiff's lawyers -- and he's got the Ferrari, Maserati, yacht, condos and mansions to prove his success.

"The last thing you want is to be on the witness stand with Larry Franklin questioning you," said Dr. Robert Flynn, a University of Louisville surgery professor.

Yet before he was hired to handle what may be his most sensational case -- representing the family of Kaitlyn Lasitter, the 13-year-old whose legs were severed on a ride at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom -- Franklin's name was not widely known to the public.

Among lawyers, hospital executives and doctors, though, the 70-year-old who has practiced 40 years is a larger-than-life icon known for spending whatever it takes to win -- and whatever he wants on himself and his staff, whom he showers with furs, shopping sprees, out-of-town trips and even free breast implants, according to former employees.

He is a legendary big spender, they say, who has plunked down $5,000 for a bottle of cognac for a Christmas party and $4,000 for a single bottle of wine at dinner.

He and his wife Judy own a $1.1 million condo in Key West; a four-bedroom lake house in Breckinridge County, where the awnings retract automatically when the wind blows too hard; and a Cherokee Triangle mansion that they're spending $3 million to renovate.

He practices out of the 15,237-square foot Speed mansion on West Ormsby Avenue in Old Louisville, a sprawling, three-story building that includes a gym and a salon, where a hairdresser and manicurist visit each month to spruce up his employees.

He is almost pathologically generous, friends and colleagues say, offering the Florida condo to witnesses at depositions before the first question is asked, and lending his Ferrari to "half the lawyers in Louisville," says trial attorney Doug Morris, one of Franklin's former law clerks.

Franklin offers an old saying in explaining his largesse: "Money is like manure; it has no use until you spread it around."

He grew up in Shively, as he never tires of telling juries, and "he has a desire to prove himself," said former state Supreme Court Justice Nick King, his partner for 11 years.

"He really doesn't need a Ferrari and Maserati to convince people that he is an excellent trial lawyer," Weiss said. "He'd be one if he drove a Taurus."

But former clients say they don't begrudge him a dime. The exotic cars "are his little merit badges that speak to his success," said Dr. Ron Fadel, whom Franklin represented in a landmark suit against two lawyers who had sued him in what was ruled a groundless malpractice claim.

A standout going back to Valley High

At age 17, he was named "Mr. Valley High School" at the Dixie Highway school where he was salutatorian, star center of the football team, and president of his junior and senior classes.

At the U.S. Naval Academy, he ranked first in aptitude in the 800-member class of 1959, and after submarine school and serving in Vietnam, he finished the University of Louisville's four-year night law school program in three years, according to published accounts.

"The hardest thing about law school," he has said, "was finding a place to park."

He learned personal injury law from one of the masters -- the late Joe Leibson, who was later a circuit judge.

In 1976, he won a verdict against LG&E on behalf of a Haitian immigrant and her husband, who were horribly burned when a defective gas furnace exploded. But Franklin was crushed, recalled his then-law clerk, attorney Ann Oldfather, because the jury returned only $275,000 in damages, less than 10 percent of what they'd sought.

"Jurors said afterward that they would have given them more but they didn't think they would know what to do with it," Franklin said.

In 1980, he won a $1 million verdict against Armor Elevator Co. for a repairman who was injured when a defective elevator plummeted four floors to the basement of the Kentucky Home Life Building. Before the trial, Franklin said, he strapped himself on the outside of the elevator so he could ride it up and down to see exactly how it was supposed to work.

After the 1988 Carrollton bus collision involving a wrong-way driver that killed 24 children and three adults, he and then-partner Michael Hance represented one of only two families who rejected a quick settlement from bus manufacturer Ford Motor Co. and took the corporation to trial.

"They thought they were coming to Podunk, and he outmatched them 100 to 1," Karolyn Nunnallee, whose daughter Patty burned to death on the bus, said of Ford's out-of-town attorneys. "He was like a bulldog."

The Nunnallees received $5 million -- 10 times what the other families got.

As Franklin's reputation grew, so did the settlements he was able to strike, according to a resume of his accomplishments. They ranged from at least $1 million for a girl born with neurological damage after an unlicensed respiratory therapist with a history of drug abuse set an oxygen machine at zero, to eight figures for a girl born profoundly retarded and unable to walk, talk or close her eyelids because, Franklin contended, her mother wasn't properly monitored during labor.

In recent years, as some lawyers his age might look to retire, Franklin has scored some of his biggest verdicts at trial.

He won $4 million in 2000 for Johnny Shelton, a Southern Indiana high school football player who suffered brain damage after he was prematurely cleared to play by a doctor who examined him for only three or four minutes.

And in 2004, he and Hance won a $19.2 million verdict against Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and other defendants for marketing a lactose suppressant that they showed caused 32-year-old grocery clerk Mary Gunderson to suffer a fatal seizure after childbirth.

The same year, he won a $27.6 million verdict against Baptist Hospital East, showing it had credentialed an insufficiently experienced doctor and that its nurses failed to properly question her erroneous orders, resulting in severe brain damage to newborn Spencer Sapp.

Courtroom style is rarely flashy

During his opening statement in the Carrollton bus crash case -- in which the deaths were blamed on an improperly protected gas tank -- Franklin unveiled the tank that had ruptured and burst into flames when a drunken driver slammed into the bus.

"The effect could scarcely have been more chilling if the Grim Reaper himself had clattered in and taken a bow," wrote James Kunen in his book, "Reckless Disregard: Corporate Greed, Government Indifference and the Kentucky School Bus Crash."

But Franklin is hardly theatrical. He doesn't scream, he doesn't preach, and at times his voice is so low that it is barely audible in the courtroom. Kunen described him as "a rhetorician from the Dwight Eisenhower mold."

"He fumbled, hesitated, repeated himself, misspoke," Kunen wrote of the bus-crash trial. "But somewhere in the thicket of words lurked a fundamental intelligence. He was all over the place, but when the smoke cleared, he'd hit everything."

Said Franklin: "There are lawyers who are like Shakespearean actors, but that's not me. I speak the language of the people. I am from Shively."

Randy Lasitter, Kaitlyn's father, said he and his wife Monique hired Franklin in part because "he didn't try to be flashy and he didn't make us feel uncomfortable."

Franklin said he doesn't hire jury consultants and doesn't use focus groups. He said he looks for jurors who "work with their hands" and "don't look down their noses at anyone."

"He wants the 12 people in the box to think he is just like them," King said, "though I doubt they drive Ferraris."

Hard work, sharp wits and playing dumb

Opponents and allies alike say there are no secrets to Franklin's success.

"Time, effort, an exorbitantly quick mind and money: You put those things together and you have Larry Franklin," King said.

His former clerks say he is a tough taskmaster. Morris said he once drafted a memo parodying his boss's demands: "To Doug," it said. "Bring me the world."

For a single case, Franklin said, he's spent as much as $1 million on expert witnesses and other expenses.

He also is selective: For every case he takes, he said, he turns down 15 to 20.

And he's very smart at playing dumb, friends and adversaries say.

"I've seen him show up at depositions in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, and they're thinking, 'Who is this guy?' " said Dr. John Johnson, a friend who is chairman of U of L's department of orthopedic surgery. "He disarms the opposition, then chews them up and spits them out. He is thinking 10 miles ahead of them."

Former clients and counsel say Franklin is ultimately successful because he cares about injured people.

"For a guy who comes across as Mr. Macho," Oldfather said, Franklin, who rose to the rank of rear admiral in the Navy Reserve, "has a really huge soft spot for his clients. "Franklin is protective of the term "trial lawyer" and disdains those he thinks don't deserve the title, particularly when they try their hand at complex medical malpractice cases.

"It's like a family practitioner doing neurosurgery," he sneered.

As an expert witness -- and a trial lawyer -- he has defended doctors who he thought were unfairly sued.

"We're too litigation-happy in this country," he testified in a deposition on behalf of a neurosurgeon who successfully fought back. "We do owe a duty to society as a whole not to use this power that we're given as lawyers to unnecessarily involve innocent people in litigation."

He understands that power.

"Just with the stroke of a pen," he said, "I can bring the whole judicial process down upon anyone in the phone book."

Critics in court and the neighborhood

That kind of power doesn't win friends in every corner.

"Larry has been very aggressive in attacking some of our faculty," said Dr. Hiram Polk, chairman of U of L's surgery department, "but I guess that is the nature of his business."

Dr. Stephen Burton, a family physician against whom Franklin last year lost a case at trial, would say only, "I couldn't do what he does."

One of Franklin's adversaries, attorney Kennedy Simpson, who defended Baptist Hospital East in the Sapp case, accused Franklin of violating court orders 28 times by mentioning matters that had been ruled off-limits.

And Jefferson Circuit Judge Barry Willett, who once clerked in Franklin's firm, said he can be "a little hard to control in the courtroom sometimes."

Willett recalled one case in 1999 when Franklin asked a witness about an issue that he'd just been ordered not to broach.

Opposing counsel generally describe Franklin as trustworthy and a gentleman, although Northern Kentucky lawyer Michelle Keller said he refused to shake her hand last year after she won a case against him -- and only sent her a dozen roses after she filed to run for the Kentucky Court of Appeals, a race she won.

Franklin has also drawn the ire of some of his neighbors on Ransdell Avenue over the renovation of a 107-year-old mansion to which he and his wife are adding an elevator tower, a pool, three-car garage and 7-foot-high perimeter wall.

Franklin's wife, the former Judy Bidwell, works as his secretary. He has four children from three previous marriages, the first of which was to Judy Marshall, the singing star of "Hayloft Hoedown" and other WHAS television and radio programs.

His other marriages were to a receptionist and a lawyer at the firm, which he attributes to spending too much time at work and "poor social skills."

He said that he respects women -- he hired Oldfather to represent him in all three of his divorces -- and that was just kidding when he used to hand out T-shirts at depositions that said "SPERM  Society for the Promotion of Equal Rights for Men."

"I warned him that that you are going to get your butt sued someday and I am going to be representing whoever is suing you," Oldfather said with a laugh in an interview.

Franklin won't comment on his income, other than to say it fluctuates dramatically from year to year. (In 1998, he said in court papers that his gross pay had averaged about $110,000 a month over the previous five years.)

But he said he spends lavishly on himself -- and others -- in part because he's a survivor of prostate cancer and other health scares. "I've almost died a couple of times," he said. "I want to live life to the fullest."

Friends said he also donates generously to several charities.

In an interview, he said recent weeks have been a "sad time" because of a divorce of another sort -- with Hance, with whom he practiced for more than 25 years.

Hance wouldn't discuss the reasons for the split, and Franklin would only say that they had different goals.

But Weiss said that Franklin has never been "at peace with himself" -- and Franklin says he's right.

"My father always wanted me to do better," he said. "I brought home my report card one time and he asked what the plus signs were next to some of the A's.

"I explained to him that meant they were better than A's," Franklin recalled. "And he said, 'Why aren't the all A-plusses?' "